"Charles Stross - Rogue Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

"Sqautting in the woods down by the stream," she said tersely. "Just over our fence."

"It's not trespassing, then."

"It's put down feeder roots! Do you have any idea what that means?"

"I don't --" Joe's face wrinkled in puzzlement. "Oh."
"Yes. oh." She stared back at the outbuildings between their home and the woods at the
bottom of their smallholding, and if looks could kill,the intruder would be dead a
thousand times over. "It's going to estivate, Joe, then it's going to grow to maturity on
our patch. And do you know where it said it was going to go when it finishes growing?
Jupiter!"

"Bugger," Joe said faintly, as the true gravity of their situation began to sink in. "We'll
have to deal with it first."

"That wasn't what I meant," Maddie finished. But Joe was already on his way out the
door. She watched him crossing the yard, then shook her head. "Why am I stuck here?"
she asked herself, but the cooker wasn't answering.

###

The hamlet of Outer Cheswick lay four kilometres down the road from Armitage End,
four kilometres past mostly derelict houses and broken down barns, fields given over to
weeds and walls damaged by trees. The first half of the twenty-first century had been
cruel years for the British agrobusiness sector; even harsher if taken in combination with
the decline in population and the consequent housing surplus. As a result,the drop-outs
of the forties and fifties were able to take their pick from among the gutted shells of once
fine farmhouses. They chose the best and moved in, squatted in the derelict
outbuildings, planted their seeds and tended their flocks and practiced their DIY skills,
until a generation later a mansion fit for a squire stood in lonely isolation alongside a
decaying road where no more cars drove. Or rather, it would have taken a generation
had there been any children against whose lives it could be measured; these were the
latter decades of the population crash,and what a previous century would have labelled
downshifter dink couples were now in the majority, far outnumbering any breeder
colonies. In this aspect of their life, Joe and Maddie were boringly conventional. In other
respects they weren't: Maddie's nightmares, her aversion to alcohol, and her withdrawl
from society were all relics of her time in Peaceforce. As for Joe, he liked it here. Hated
cities, hated the net, hated the burn of the new. Anything for a quiet life ...

The Pig and Pizzle, on the outskirts of Outer Cheswick, was the only pub within about
ten kilometres -- certainly the only one within staggering distance for Joe when he'd had
a skinful of mild -- and it was naturally a seething den of local gossip, not least because
Ole Brenda refused to allow electricity, much less bandwidth, into the premises. (This
was not out of any sense of misplaced technophobia, but a side-effect of Brenda's
previous life as an attack hacker with the European Defense Forces.)

Joe paused at the bar. "Pint of bitter?" he asked tentatively. Brenda glanced at him and
nodded, then went back to loading the antique washing machine. Presently she pulled a
clean glass down from the shelf and held it under the tap.